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In my time at the TLG, there was many a mediaeval Greek word that was not in the main dictionaries—Lampe, Trapp (which was not yet complete at the time), and Kriaras (ditto); and I would expend pleasant and assiduous effort in trying to track those words down elsewhere.

One such word was the Byzantine Greek word for brocade, φουφούδιον. It’s in Trapp’s dictionary now that Vol. VIII has appeared (after the end of my time at the TLG):

So we have fufuði(o)n, in one text fofoðin, 1 attested in various monastic texts of the 11th through 13th century. We have the related adjective fufuðotos, attested (mispelled) in the appendix to DuCange’s 1688 Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae Graecitatis (presumably from a manuscript no longer available). And we have the variant fufulion, attested in the 10th century Book of the Eparch of Leo the Wise, as well as the 12th century typikon of the mponastery of Theotokos Kecharitomene. The latter word survives in Pontic Greek as fufulin, and in standard Greek as fufula (Stamatakos is a Modern Greek dictionary): per the Triantafyllidis dictionaryfufula refers to “the lower hind part of islander breeches (vraka), which is puffy and has folds; breeches by extension; pantaloons for women and children, held up by suspenders”.

Trapp’s volume wasn’t out at the time I came across the word in the TLG. But other sources had already published fufuðion.

Such as Girolamo Caracausi’s Lessico Greco della Sicilia e dell’Italia meridionale (secoli x–xiv), a dictionary of the monastic documents of southern Italy, where it is glossed as “a kind of cloth”, with Falkenhausen’s example and two others, and with the contemporary Latin phrases from the same region, fuffude rossa et citrina (1065) and uno fuffudi citrino et nigro (1088). I had in fact gone through Caracausi for words for the TLG, but for some reason I had missed φουφούδιον.

I first find it through the word’s transmission into Russian. The word shows up in Old Russian as fofudja; and because of the delay in getting the lexicography of Byzantine Greek up and running, the only source Vasmer had access to in his etymological dictionary of Russian (where it is glossed as “precious fabric for imperial clothes”) was the 1688 attestation of fufuðotos.

The word was quite obscure and was not included in several editions of orthographic dictionaries either in Ukraine or Russia.

According to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, fofudja (Russian: фофудья, Greek: φουφουδότης) [which is presumably a distortion of DuCange’s φουφουδοτός] is an oriental precious cloth woven with gold thread and often used in ceremonial garments in the Byzantine Empire during the time of Kievan Rus and similar to an ephod. Fofudja was was mentioned as a form of payment in the 12th century birch bark documents found in the Veliky Novgorod excavation. Fofudja was mentioned in the Radziwiłł Chronicle in the 13th century when Leo VI the Wise rewarded Oleg of Novgorod with gold, fofudja and other items. The term is mentioned again when Vladimir II Monomakh distributed fofudja, among other goods, to the people on their way to the church.

Note that Leo VI the Wise was the 10th century emperor to whom the Book of Eparch was attributed, which had fufulion. The fufuðion was expressly mentioned as Byzantine in the Russian sources, and is mentioned over the same period it appears in Byzantine sources, 11th through 13th centuries.

Fofudja/Fufudin passed out of use in both the Greek-speaking and the Russian-speaking world, though the related fufulin clearly survived in Greek. There are two paradoxical survivals of Fofudja/Fufudin though.

There’s a reason I was able to find mentions of fofudja online so easy:

Fofudja (Russian: Фофудья [fɐˈfudʲjə]) is an internet and social phenomenon in the Ukrainian segment of the LiveJournal community. While its name denotes a piece of religious clothing, it has been used lately as a satirical protest against Russian imperialism, xenophobia, ukrainophobia, antisemitism and religious intolerance. By application of reductio ad absurdum this phenomenon involves people assuming comically exaggerated xenophobic and antisemitic views with the aim to mock them. As such, members of the Fofudja community sarcastically purport to be members of the supposedly oppressed Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine suffering from nationalist and Zionist oppression.

[…]

The theme of this phenomenon can be traced back to another widely popular Ukrainian Internet creation — a novel “The City of Lvov”. [started 2006–02–20] This satirical Internet novel written by “Professor” Ivan Denikin (a pen name of an unknown joker) deals with a few Russians traveling to Lviv and on their way encountering “unspeakable suffering” of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine brought on by Ukrainization.

[…]

The main symbol of this phenomenon is the fofudja itself. In the view of some observers the name was probably selected because of a number of factors: because of its obscurity, because it sounds similar to a piece of clothing called fufaika, and also due to its Byzantine origin and orthodox symbolism. Members of the community sarcastically position themselves as semi-underground Russian minority in present-day Ukraine, proud Russian patriots and devout Orthodox Christians.

[…]

Fofudja as a piece of religious clothing is meant to be a symbol of Russian Orthodoxy and of Russian culture. Participants believe that they will be persecuted by Ukrainian authorities for wearing it in public as a piece of national Russian costume. In fact, the leader of Ukrainian communists Petro Symonenko was asked in an Internet conference the following question:

“Hello, I am from Kherson oblast and I am an ethnic Russian. My daughter was prohibited from wearing a fofudja at school, a symbol of Russian culture — on the grounds that the state language is Ukrainian. I just wanted to ask you, Peter Nikolayevich, for how long [will it last]?

Unsuspecting of being a victim of a practical joke by members of the fofudja community and willing to profit on the sensitive inter-ethnic question Mr. Symonenko promised to “look into it”.

[…]

The symbol of “fofudja”, the catchphrase “доколє” (“for how long” “until when”, an archaic question word), the Russian-Ukrainian letter mix and the Imperial Cyrillic — these are the distinctive features of this Internet phenomenon that spread beyond the Live Journal blog and into the wider community in Ukraine.

Hence, the fofudja in its natural contemporary habitat, as a meme accompanied by the archaic and plaintive доколє “for how long”:

The Greek survival of fufuðion is somewhat less spectacular. On the other hand, if you’re a dialectologist, it’s arguably more spectacular.

Nikolaos Pantelidis is a dialectologist at Athens University, and he has been researching dialects that have gotten short shrift in Modern Greek dialectology, notably Peloponnesian. In Το παλαιοαθηναϊκό ιδίωμα: Πηγές, μαρτυρίες, χαρακτηριστικά, he assembles all available sources to date on the Old Athenian dialect—which, thanks to two recently published 19th century plays, are a lot more sources than we used to have. The dialect has gone from almost unattested, to attested enough for him to extract a basic grammar. (And for me to formulate an impressionistic description of it as a Tsakonian-flavoured Cretan.)

Of the two plays, Gynaikokratia (1841) has a brief speech in Old Athenian, written by Dimitrios Byzantios/Hatziaslanis, the same playwright who wrote the renowned satire of Modern Greek linguistic diversity Babel. The second, with a more extensive speech, is Sotirios Kourtesis’ 1862 Ο Καρπάθιος ή ο κατά φαντασίαν ερώμενος “The Carpathian, or the Imaginary Lover”.

And in the very end of the old native Athenian woman’s plaint on modern female fashions in Kourtesis’ play, in the second last page of Pantelidis’ article, right before the use of που after a dubitative verb that I wish I had been aware of for my doctoral thesis (τιγάρις θάρρευγες που σε γέλαγα—cf. A Survey of Modern Greek Dialectal Complementation), she says:

My lady, our waistcoats, our Istanbul shawls, we received as dowry, and we handed them on to our children; and as for you, two or three dresses a month are not enough for you, and that’s why no good will ever come of you, with these fufuðia you’re wearing.

The word clearly does not refer here to pantaloons, but to fancy clothes; so in fact it is closer to the fufuðion than are the pantaloons and breeches of fufula, which we know survived in Greek.

Old Athenian was a notoriously archaic dialect; it’s almost too good to be true to find a Byzantine survival like fufuðion in Athens, which was isolated from the remainder of the Greek-speaking world by Albanian incursions in the 14th century—right after fufuðion is no longer attested. And maybe the word was used more widely after all.

A look at Google Books shows that it was. In Rhodes, fufui < fufuði refers to boils on childrenʼs heads; the form is reported by Agapitos Tsopanakis in an article in Hellenika in 1985, and he also reports that he had already derived it from *ὑποφῴδιον “under-blister” in 1940. So it’s unrelated.

So the original Byzantine garment, the brocade awarded to the Rus, turns up in Symi, Missolonghi, and Athens, as a description of nice dress—clean clothes in Missolonghi, fancy clothes in Athens, precious clothes in Symi.

(I’ve also seen an instance of contemporary usage of fufuðia to mean “nonsense”, and some other scattered instances whose meaning I can’t work out; e.g. from a childbirth forum, εμενα μου την εβαλε γιατρος και μαια που με ειχαν στα φουφουδια που λεμε…με εξτρα ζελε και ξυλοκαινη-σουπερ περιποιηση “I had [the catheter] inserted by a doctor and a midwife, who had me, as the saying goes, “in the fufuðia“, with extra jelly and xylocaine: they were wonderful to me”.)

So the survival of fufuðia in Old Athenian is not as unique as I’d thought an hour ago; but it’s still a survival that (as far as I can tell) has not been linked to the Byzantine garment before.)

vinegar: “Christ drink” (since Christ was given vinegar to drink on the cross)

*nifokukula

Turkish coffee: “bride hood” (allusion unknown, unless this is an allusion to the comical coinage nifokokozomon “sober bean juice” in the play Babel (1836), satirising in that instance pedantry)

*dzas dzuzis

Adolf Hitler: “away Jesus” = “Antichrist”

Some Kaliarda words involve derogatory attitudes towards other social groups. (Shared oppression has not traditionally led to notions of allyship—although the Roma do appear to have been exempted from venom, with the benign tsinganoromvia “Gypsy barrel organ = tambourine”:

to have sex as passive partner: “to take (someone)”; hence *parθikame “we were taken” = “I was fucked”

paketo

bulge in pants: “package”

parateri

(cis) woman: “redundant” (to gay relationships)

parke

blowjob: “parquet, flooring”

partuza

group sex (now mainstream Greek) < French partouse

pentikosti

married woman (or gay man): “Pentecost” (originally: fiftieth [day]), by analogy with mainstream slang sarakosti “Lent” (originally: fortieth [day]), used with the same meaning, alluding to Lent being a period of deprivation

piasman, piasmande, piastiko

groping: < piasimo “holding”

pipiloɣamulis

tender lover: “darling fuck” (lit. “suckling fuck”)

pipiloɣatulis

tender lover: “darling kitten”

plejaro dap

to masturbate: “to play wank”

plenobeles

horny: “full testicles”

pombon

blowjob < bon-bon “lolly”; pombino frape “ibid.”

pulomusafiro

enema: “anal guest”

presvia

public urinal: “embassy”. “Embassy of the United Arab Republic” = “Athens Town Hall public toilet”; “Embassy of Great Britain” = “Syntagma Square public toilet”, named for the Grande Bretagne Hotel nearby; “Embassy of Free States” = “Field of Mars public toilet”; “Embassy of the United States” = “Omonia Square public toilet”.

ruzoskelo

period: “red legs”

sarmela, semelia, sermela, mela, melitsa

penis

sarmelozumo

sperm: “penis juice”

sarmeloxamoɣelo

coitus: “penis smile”

sarmuta

female prostitute: Koutsavakika: “fat woman”

safrans tuzur

the twink has come looking for money: Pseudo-French

semelonome

to get married to a man: “to be dicked”

semnaðerfi

lesbian: “modest sister”

sividzilu, sividzo, dzivdzilu

lesbian < dziv dziv

dziv dziv

lesbian sex: probably onomatopoeic

soloflokiazo

to masturbate: “to cum solo”

spanokukula

condom: “beardless hood”

sikafra

cancer, syphilitic ulcer: “fig (= faggot) venereal”

sfera

small penis: “bullet”

teknadzu

someone into twinks (fem., with queer referent); has passed into mainstream Greek, as woman into toyboys, cougar

(I have not been able to confirm these, and these will be Arvanitika, not standard Albanian.)

Spanish words:

kukaro

cockroach < cucaracha

otros

other < otro (if not French autre)

plaza

city square < plaza

To these we need to add Ladino semelja “penis”: this is clearly Lubunca similya “penis” < Ladino semilya “seed”. semelja is a missing link to the Ottoman Empire, since Ladino was spoken widely in Constantinople and Salonica—but not in Athens, whose Jews were Romaniote (Greek-speaking). We know that Kaliarda was spoken in Athens before Salonica became part of Greece in 1912, so semelja proves what the lack of Italian in Lubunca seemingly disproves—that Kaliarda and Lubunca share at least some common ancestry.

The much longer list is that whose etymologies defeated Petropoulos. There are by my reckoning eight Romani stems that Montoliu found and that I have not—though I’m quite sure develo ~ dzevelo and dapavelo are two of them.

Unknown Etymologies:

(avelo) napses

to chat; napsiaris is an informant, and Petropoulos derives it from anapso “to light (a fire)”

(vuelo) foria

to pressure

aθoritos

absurd; aθoritiazo to act stupidly, riskily; to gamble

vakuli

church (Petropoulos claims Venetian bangolo “brothel”, but Minniti-Gonias has not found that word in Boerio. He also suggests vakla “rod” < Latin bacillus)

verɣos

informant

vutra

breasts

ɡolos

deaf

ɡurbandos

charming (of men)

elamu

arrival; elamano “to arrive” (< ela mu “come on”?)

esapsis

wonderful

kajoros, kajos

director (Turkish cayır “quickly, noisily”?)

kanɡuri

nose

kaklamaro

to influence

kansavaro

to correct

kaprikende

matchstick (kendo “to pierce; to set alight”; hence kenda “fire” does not have an unknown etymology. See also kerikende “matchstick” < keri “candle” + kenda)

“Our journal is able to announce a journalistic success today. When we gave the truly difficult mission to our contributor Bichtis [“Pest, Sexual Harrasser”] of discovering the friends in Constantinople and collecting Makris’ correspondence towards them, we were convinced of his capability and his success, for he is a young man full of energy, zeal, and smarts, a proper spitfire. He literally has the devil inside. But he has exceeded our expectation.”

The “friends” are obviously queers in Istanbul. (I really should have been using that term instead of “gays” all along.)

I have no idea who Makris was, and what his correspondence involved, but there may be hints of it in previous issues of the magazine.

“Constantinople, 21 November. … Constantinople too has her Twelve, just like our Athens. The difference is that her circle is larger than the Omonia Square one, for more members have entered it here.”

Why yes, some of those italics are deliberate. The whole magazine did that, not just this article.

The reference to the Twelve, this confirms, is purely conventional (“Council of Elders = Queers”), since in fact there are numerically more queers in Istanbul than Athens.

“We all know that (the) language/tongue is only useful for women. Now it is confirmed that men use it too. Language/Tongue in both cases plays the major part.”

I initially thought this was indirect confirmation that Kaliarda was already familiar as the language of cis female prostitutes. But in context, it’s likely just some artless sexism plus a double entendre: “Women are all talk (tongue); but it turns out (queer) men can use their tongues for the same purpose as women. Why no, I was just referring to the use of language by both! Get your mind out of the gutter!”

“Before going further I will write on the language of the Twelve here [in Constantinople], since this is the same language as that of our Twelve [in Athens]. This is also quite important in our case, as that is what Makris’ letters are written in.”

Again, the explicit identification of Athens Lubinistika from 1904 with Istanbul Lubunca; and the old Italian vocabulary which differentiates the two is not included in the glossary.

“The report of our correspondent is quite detailed, including among others the history of our Twelve and the names, or rather pseudonyms, by which the Athens and Peiraeus members of this curious company are known, along with the age of each; we will be continuing it in many issues of our magazine.”

And indeed, while the following issue (1904–12–02) is missing from the Greek National Library and the ΕΛΙΑ press archives, the issue after that, 1904–12–09, did publish names of the “Twelve in Peiraeus”; I already noted the presence of masculine, feminine and neuter names, in contrast with the exclusively feminine names reported for 1971 by Petropoulos.

The 1904–12–16 issue left out its report on “The Twelve” for lack of space; the issue after that, 1904–12–23, is likewise missing from ΕΛΙΑ. The 1904–12–09 issue likely has a few more gems though.

Nikos Sarantakos has just published on his blog a report on Spatholouro’s finds in his blog comments of early attestation of Kaliarda, as already reported here. My thanks to him for disseminating Spatholouro’s findings more widely, as they deserve.

There’s not a lot of new information in the article, but he does mention that Manganareas’ journal Πεταχτό Κόρτε “Fleeting Flirt”,

despite its editor’s activist credentials, was one of the risque magazines of the time, with half-naked women drawn on the front cover, with cartoons with innuendo-laced captions showing ladies in negliges, with poems and witticisms full of double entendres, often italicised (e.g. “every female reader should give it to her friend—the magazine, that is.”) […] As you can see on the front cover above, the magazine shows dozens of pseudonyms of contributes, but I would not be surprised if the entire content was written by Manganaras with 2 or 3 collaborators.

Sarantakos also raises a criticism of Petropoulos’ work that is worth discussing: the lengthly witticisms in the dictionary don’t seem to be conventionalised parts of a normal cant vocabulary, but one-off opportunistic inventions, which his consultants happened to come up with:

But users of cants don’t use it so much to communicate, as to not be understood by outsiders. They don’t need to devise words for all aspects of life, because the mainstream language is enough for that. They need 100–200 basic words for their immediate interests (money, client, beautiful, ugly, small, big.)

The sense I get every time I leaf through Petropoulos’ Kaliarda is that many, if not most of those words were made up by a small group for fun, building on the existing model of Kaliarda vocabulary. I open up Petropoulos at random at <R>, and read these entries:

The compounds are very witty and inventive, and I bet the people who made them up had a lot of fun doing so; but I would be surprised if they were ever widespread among Kaliarda speakers. I fear that Petropoulos, yielding to the passion of the collector, bolstered his collection by recording the opportunistic formations of a small group.

I agree with Sarantakos that it’s unlikely that these witticisms were conventionalised—that “queen chamberpot” was the regular word for “crown”, used more than mainstream stema or korona (whenever crowns did come up in conversation). I disagree that they were out of bounds for being recorded.

Kaliarda at the beginning may well have been as limited as Dortika, when it really was being used as a secrecy language, by sex workers and gays. The minimal records we have of older Kaliarda concur: they don’t have the compounds, the jokes, and the allusions that Petropoulos recorded. (Of course, they were quite basic vocabularies, so there’d be no room for them anyway.)

But Petropoulos says that wit is a major component of speaking Kaliarda; in fact, wit is also emphasised in accounts of the much more parsimonious Lubunca, and were clearly also at work in Polari. Even in 1928, Hatzidakis says much the same about Kaliarda—that the experience of hearing any word of it is unforgettable; and I find it hard to believe that it was unforgettable merely for using a couple of Romani words in a mincing accent. Even if the coinage “queen chamberpot” was not conventionalised for “crown”, and was the invention of one particular Kaliarda speaker, I suspect that kind of coinage happened among Kaliarda speakers all the time.

And beyond that, the linguistic patterns of the coinages are revealing of how the language work. dzasberdepurotsarðo is rechercé for “National Benefaction”, and “house of an old man throwing away his money” is clearly one-off. But I doubt this was the only time dzas-berde was used to refer dismissively to philanthropy; and the variant clearly permitted such four-part compounds to be formed and understood—something not without precedent in Greek, both literary and colloquial, but in a much more schematic garb than we’re used to from Greek.

I’m going to be offline for a couple of weeks. When I get back, I’ll be posting glossed highlights of the Kaliarda vocabulary, and drawing this series to a close.

The research contribution of Biondo’s thesis is a survey of attitudes towards Lubunca by gay Turks in Turkey and Germany, and the extent of their usage of it. There is some introductory material, and a glossary of Lubunca; I suspect much of this material is in Kontovas’ thesis, but I’m going through it for completeness.

p. 17. The slang of the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, studied by Özdemir Kaptan in 1988, is polyglot, and includes Greek, Italian, French, Armenian, Russian and English; this reflects the polyglot nature of Beyoğlu (mediaeval Pera) itself, as the Venetian and Genoese settlment, and then as the Levantine centre of Istanbul.

p. 27. Kontovas included as characteristic of Lubunca the use of alıkmak as a light verb, and the use of -matik, -oz, oş as derivational suffixes. (p. 117 alıkmak is based on Turkish almak “to take”; -ık- is obscure.)

p. 27. The first Turkish slang dictionary was Lugat-i Garibe by A. Fikri, 28 pp long, from 1889/1890. Next came Devellioğlu’s 1941 dictionary, then Hulki Aktunç’s 1990 Türkçenin Büyük Argo Sözlüğü, which is the major reference on Turkish slang. Slang studies in Turkish have intensified since the 1990s.

p. 84. Lubunca is also known as labunca, lubunyaca, kelavca. kelav is Lubunca for “prostitute”; lubunyaca is the older form of lubunca, from lubunya “gay bottom, trans woman” < Romani lubhni “whore”. So Lubunca lubunya, like Lubinistika/Kaliarda lubina, conflated cis female prostitutes and queers as reflexes of lubhni. (I’d been avoiding queer as too generic till now, but it’s better than ibne or gay or gay bottoms and trans woman.)

p. 118: lubunya has spread to general Turkish slang. labunya is a synonym of lubunya; cf. Manganaras’ recorded form labuni, which appears to correspond to later lubina.

p. 84. Online sources speak of 300–400 words of Lubunca; Kontovas, recall, found 158 roots. Petropoulos, it should be said, recorded 3000 words (700 roots), but guessed there were more like 5000 extant.

p. 86. Kontovas concluded Lubunca must have originated in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire—the use of “58” as a visual pun only makes sense before the 1932 introduction of the Roman alphabet. Lubunca as we now know it was standardised in the 80s (when it was first recorded) and 90s, a time which speakers consider the golden age of Lubunca. (Speakers of Kaliarda would be unanimous that the golden age of that language was Petropoulos’ time.)

p. 87. Romani is no longer spoken by Istanbul Roma, but it was in the 60s; so Lubunca must have originated before then. The Greek in Kaliarda would date from before the exodus of Istanbul Greeks after the 1955 pogrom. (Recall that Manganaras found a language he identified with Kaliarda, spoken in Istanbul in 1904; Kontovas would not have been aware of that source.)

p. 88. Kontovas situates the origin of Lubunca in Beyoğlu and Şişli, where the Levantines lived, contributing their languages to Lubunca; the Roma of Istanbul also lived in Beyoğlu, and that is where trans sex workers in Istanbul work to this day. Kontovas (2012: 40)

The engagement of Queers, Roma, and other gayrimüslim [non-Muslim] minority women in unregistered sex work during the latter years of the Ottoman Empire and early years of the Turkish Republic explains the cohabitation of social space and corresponding experience of similar social conditions that catalysed in the exchange of linguistic material exhibited by Lubunca.

p., 93. Lubunca is still much used in its original context of sex work, but it has spread more widely as an emblematic language, including among gay activists.

p. 96. Lubunca is used by both gay men and gay women, although the sexual vocabulary of Lubunca is ibne-oriented. (There does not seem to have been any takeup of Kaliarda by lesbians, and lesbians are consistently absent in the sources—though Kaliarda is certainly aware they exist.) The secrecy function of Lubunca is becoming less prominent.

p. 119. paparon for “policeman” got a lot of use in the 80s and 90s to refer to the policemen persecuting trans women; it is now being displaced by beybi < English baby. Already in Petropoulos’ time, paparuna had been truncated to runa, and its earlier form forgotten—Petropoulos was certainly unaware of it.

p. 120. belde ~ berde “money” is used almost exclusively with reference to payment for sex. One informant claimed that gays would not use belde outside of sexual contexts, but that trans people would extend it from payment for sex to payment for work in general.

p. 122. homoş “homosexual” and malbuş “Marlboro cigarette” are formed with the pseudo-Greek suffix -oş.

p. 125, 127. The same has happened with ibnoş, reclaimed from mainstream Turkish ibne, and used ironically.

p. 126. The Romani denyo “crazy” has generalised from Lubunca to general Turkish slang.

p. 135. çaça “madam of brothel” is listed as Lubunca; it is derived from either the dance cha cha cha, or Venetian ciaciarar “to chatter”. As it turns out, mainstream Greek tsaˈtsa means the same, and is not a particularly obscure word; Greek dictionaries derive it from the nursery word ˈtsatsa “auntie”. The Greek etymology is rather more plausible than either of (Kontovas’?) suggestions, and would make this the fifth Greek word of Lubunca.

p. 137. The sixth Greek word of Lubunca is hoy “no”, which may come from Greek dialectal oi “no”; the form is only attested in the “Memrise Lubunca Course”.

p. 139. maydanoz “hair” < “parsley” is not the seventh Greek word of Lubunca, since maydanoz is already well established in Standard Turkish as a Greek loanword.

p. 138. laço in Lubunca is specialised to mean “20–40 year old man; active gay; virile gay”—so in fact what Kaliarda speakers would have referred to as a kolambaras, though presumably with less of the toxicity of kulampara/ibne relations that the Kaliarda usage was characterised by, since the term is in contemporary use (“active gay” rather than “active sex tourist”). laçovari, accordingly, means “masculine”.

p. 139. minco has moved from meaning “vagina” to meaning “anus”, something that may reflect the more recent attestation of Lubunca compared to Kaliarda, with at least some trans women more overtly identify their anatomy as feminine. We saw that in Kaliarda, even in the 80s, mudzo was restricted to cis women by speakers who themselves identified as trans.

The first 9 pp of Kontovas’ thesis are available online. They’re actually enough to answer a lot of questions about Kaliarda.

The Turkish Gay Cant has a name, then, and lubunca, lubunyaca is the exact Turkish equivalent of lubinistika, the usual name for Kaliarda (at least by outsiders) before Petropoulos: “whore-language”, from Romani lubhni.

It’s mainly used in Istanbul, but is spreading to other big cities (just as Kaliarda was an Athens and Salonica language).

Its daily use is now limited to trans female sex workers in Istanbul; it was in common use among gay males in the late 20th century. (Kaliarda has also declined in Greek, although an attenuated version of it has picked up in emblematic use.)

Sources on Lubunca are no earlier than 1981, and many of them are roundabout (translations of queer-themed French texts); the Lubunca Sözluk [Dictionary] appeared online in 2010, and the 2008 Büyük Argo Sözlüğü [Great Slang Dictionary] by Aktunç helped Kontovas sift Lubunca from other Turkish slangs. [The pre-Petropoulos attestations of Kaliarda were unearthed in response to my posts, by blog commenters with access to digitised Greek press archives; there may be treasures waiting to be found in the Turkish archives for Lubunca as well, and we know that Manganaras explicitly said in 1904 that he found the same Gay cant in Piraeus and Istanbul.]

Petropoulos had a rich harvest of vocabulary for Kaliarda: 3000 headwords, 700 of them root words (and 52 of those Romani). There’s much less there for Lubunca: 153 lexemes, 85 lexical roots. That count is comparable to the 100-odd words (all root words) Triantafyllidis recorded for Dortika (and I’ve already commented that Lubunca as Khyuchukov & Bakker recorded it looked like a para-Romani, just as Dortika does).

Lubunca is meant to be spoken with a stereotypically “gay” or ‘camp” intonation (just as Kaliarda is).

We finally have an explanation for Kaliarda berde “money”, which looked like the Turkish-derived word for “curtain”. The Lubunca for “money” is belde, which is an anagram of Turkish bedel “price, cost, fine”. Metatheses are frequent components of cants, and Christodoulou had remarked on them in Greek slangs; they also appear in Kaliarda, but rather less frequently than for other slangs. The only two instances in Lubunca are bedel and şebzü < beşyüz “five hundred”.

Lubunca also uses written puns: ellisekiz “(notorious) bottom” < “58”, which in Arabic numerals looks like an anus and an erect penis. That kind of pun is not alien to Greek: generations have tittered over <ῳ>.

26 of the 85 roots of Lubunca are Romani. We have a few additions from Khyuchukov & Bakker, and they explain a few more things about Kaliarda (particularly nakka):

Lubunca

Romani

Kaliarda

balamoz “old man”

balamo “non-Roma man; boss

balamos “client of prostitute”

çavo “young gay male”

çhavo “Romani boy

cf. tekno “twink, child” < Rom. tikno “small”

dik(el), tikel “to see, to glance, to look”

dikhel “he sees

ðikelo “to see”

koli “sex”

kolin “chest, breast”

—

matiz “drunk”

mato “drunk”

Older Kaliarda matalo “drunk”

nakka “nothing, none, no”

na khan “not at all”

naka “nothing, none, no”

tato “bath”

tato “warm”

—

So naka is not a variant of Albanian nukë, although I suspect its synonym nuku is; a few Albanian words do turn up in Kaliarda, and Arvanitika was the pre-modern language of much of Attica, including parts of Athens itself.

The Romani in Lubunca is at times heavily altered, and reflects a mélange of the variants of Romani common in the Balkans.

Greek has contributed four words, and the first is our old friend paparon, paparun, paparos “policeman”, from paparuna “poppy” (now truncated to runa in Kaliarda). We saw this was Koutsavakika slang as early as 1906; Aktunç’s slang dictionary explains it as a type of cigarette, and he is likely right.

There are also a few words from Armenian, Ladino, and Arabic. The word similya “penis” < Ladino semilya “seed” may be related to the Kaliarda sarmela “penis”.

There are only one or two Italian lexemes: albergo “hotel” < albergo, and possible laçka “old bottom” < lascia “leave him”? That is a striking difference with Kaliarda, whose Italian component is massive, and which Montoliu explained as Levantine, i.e. Ottoman; it might be that Greeks had access to Italian vocabulary in a way that Turks did not, as fellow Christians.

There is one word apiece from Bulgarian, Kurdish, and Russian.

As with Kaliarda, there are a lot of words with uncertain etymology, and many of them are likely inventions meant to sound foreign.